Many entities that provide a product or service request detailed information from recipients or potential recipients of the product or service. Specifically, the collected information can allow the entities to provide better products and services to the individuals. Additionally, many entities are required by law to collect personal information when providing certain services. For instance, medical providers, government entities, retail providers, and other service providers often use questionnaires to collect personal information about patients, citizens, customers, etc., to personalize a service to an individual or to comply with governmental regulations. Likewise, employers frequently need to request detailed information from employees.
Conventionally, some entities use physical form documents (e.g., a printed paper document) to obtain personal information from the recipients of the service. Physical form documents require individuals to enter the requested information by hand using a pen, for example. Due to the various drawbacks of physical form documents (e.g., illegible handwriting, complexity of document, time to write and read information, environmental concerns), some entities attempt to digitize a physical form document. However, simply digitizing a physical form document (e.g., into a PDF) often does not provide an individual or entity with any improvement in quality or time savings—and in fact—often causes confusion, difficulty, and more inefficiencies compared to having an individual provide handwritten information on a physical form document. Similarly, a digitized physical form document often creates difficulties and frustrations for entities that need access to the information.
Due to the above disadvantages, some entities may want to use an electronic question and answer format, for example, an electronic survey. Although conventional information collection systems allow for the creation of electronic surveys, conventional information collection systems usually require trained and experienced survey administrators to create and administer an electronic survey that effectively and accurately requests and provides personal information. Moreover, even given a trained and experienced survey administrator, conventional information collection systems typically require hours, days, or weeks for a survey administrator to create an electronic survey.
For example, conventional information collection systems often rely on direct user input in order to create an electronic survey. Due to this technological barrier, conventional information collection systems rely almost solely on a survey administrator's experience and knowhow to create the wording for a question, create an answer format, and organize a flow of an electronic survey. Relying almost exclusively on direct user input results in producing various inefficiencies with conventional information collection systems. For instance, a survey administrator will often create more electronic questions than is needed, which results in consuming additional storage space to store electronic survey data.
Similarly, creating an excessive number of questions consumes additional communication bandwidth to administer the electronic survey. Furthermore, with conventional information collection systems, electronic surveys will often have to be administered multiple times due to errors resulting from direct user input (e.g., based on lack experience or human error). Thus, conventional information collection systems often consume significant amounts of computer resources by administering erroneous electronic surveys, storing inaccurate electronic survey answers, and analyzing inaccurate, incorrect, or irrelevant response data.
Accordingly, these and other disadvantages exist with respect to conventional systems electronic survey systems.